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Ask HN: Hosting in China

6 points by mkuhn ↗ HN
A startup I'm founding with a few friends will be offering a web service in China. Although we have people that are based there and very familiar with the business side of things they have no clue about the technological side and therefore also no idea about the hosting solutions available.

Does anyone here know or have experience with a Chinese hoster that provides reliable (priority) and affordable hosting?

14 comments

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drKarl
Why does the hosting have to be chinese? The advantage of internet based startups is that everything is global. I'm sure there are great hostings in South Korea, for instance.
mkuhn
Do you know about a good Host in the region then.

There are quite a few reasons why hosting in Chine would make sense, the number one being latency.

byoung2
You can host on Amazon EC2, selecting the Asia Pacific (Singapore) region (the same goes for S3, SimpleDB, etc). I'm not sure if the plan is to go global, but if you do, you can easily expand into US (East and West) as well as EU (Ireland).
mkuhn
The plan is to stay local as the service is tailored to the Chinese market.

I've been thinking of Amazon in Singapore as well, especially in combination with Scalr which would allow for a certain degree of automatic scaling.

stabbbie
candis.com.cn is the only one to use!
mkuhn
Can you elaborate why? What was your experience with them?

My Chinese is a bit rusty (actually non existent) so I will have to trust Google Translate and my Partners for a translation of the site, the English language version doesn't work for me.

stabbbie
My company actually uses hosting in Hong Kong. But to note, in HK you can still get blocked by the firewall, but they respond quickly and change IP's. Dedicated/VPS solutions not so easy.

You will also need an ICP number for hosting inside mainland China. This is linked to the IP number. You need this.

mkuhn
Bur for Hosting in Hong Kong that provides the service to mainland China I guess no ICP number is needed, right?

Also, since you seem to have quite a bit of experience, what is your take on Hosting on EC2 (Singapore) or other similar solutions?

ch3n
i'm a chinese,it's too complicate to offering a web service in china,because you have to get a bunch of licences from the government,and the censorship,you know. so,it's better hosting your web at like ec2,linode or something. or you can check this out http://www.net.cn
ysh4u
As a student studying abroad in Shanghai right now, I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised by the speed at which the sites I host at slicehost.com load. Granted, when I ssh in to manage the stack it lags quite a bit, but it seems you'll probably be developing from the US side.

In summary, I think that any good US hosting service probably has reliable speeds in China too.

On a different tangent, I'm currently writing a research paper on differences between US and Chinese business practices. If you could answer some questions, or me to someone that'd be great! ysh4u@virginia.edu

zkoch
Do you speak Chinese? I'm an American working in China, and I can point you to a number of sites that offer hosting here, though the sites are almost exclusively in Chinese. Feel free to shoot me an email: zachkoch@gmail.com.
mkuhn
Will shoot you an email. Thanks!